CHAPTER FIVE

HARLEMITE

"Get'cha goood haaaaam an' cheeeeese... sandwiches! Coffee! Candy! Cake! Ice Cream!"
Rocking along the tracks every other day for four hours between Boston and New York in the
coach aisles of the New York, New Haven & Hartford's "Yankee Clipper."
Old Man Rountree, an elderly Pullman porter and a friend of Elk's, had recommended the railroad
job for me. He had told her the war was snatching away railroad men so fast that if I could pass
for twenty-one, he could get me on.
Ella wanted to get me out of Boston and away from Sophia. She would have loved nothing better
than to have seen me like one of those Negroes who were already thronging Roxbury in the
Army's khaki and thick shoes-home on leave from boot camp. But my age of sixteen stopped that.
I went along with the railroad job for my own reasons. For a long time I'dwanted to visit New York
City. Since I had been in Roxbury, I had heard a lot about "the Big Apple," as it was called by the
well-traveled musicians, merchant mariners, salesmen, chauffeurs for white families, and various
kinds of hustlers I ran into. Even as far back as Lansing, I had been hearing about how fabulous
New York was, and especially Harlem. In fact, my father had described Harlem with pride, and
showed us pictures of the huge parades by the Harlem followers of Marcus Garvey. And every
time Joe Louis won a fight against a white opponent, big front-page pictures in the Negro
newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Afro-
American showed a sea of Harlem Negroes cheering and waving and the Brown Bomber
waving back at them from the balcony of Harlem's Theresa Hotel. Everything I'd ever heard about
New York City was exciting-things like Broadway's bright lights and the Savoy Ballroom and
Apollo Theater in Harlem, where great bands played and famous songs and dance steps and
Negro stars originated.
But you couldn't just pick up and go to visit New York from Lansing, or Boston, or anywhere elsenot
without money. So I'd never really given too much thought to getting to New York until the free
way to travel there came in the form of Ella's talk with old man Rountree, who was a member of
Ella's church.
What Ella didn't know, of course, was that I would continue to see Sophia. Sophia could get away
only a few nights a week. She said, when I told her about the train job, that she'd get away every
night I got back into Boston, and this would mean every other night, if I got the run I wanted.
Sophia didn't want me to leave at all, but she believed I was draft age already, and thought the
train job would keep me out of the Army.
Shorty thought it would be a great chance for me. He was worried sick himself about the draft call
that he knew was soon to come. Like hundreds of the black ghetto's young men, he was taking
some stuff that, it was said, would make yourheart sound defective to the draft board's doctors.
Shorty felt about the war the same way I and most ghetto Negroes did: "Whitey owns everything.
He wants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight."
Anyway, at the railroad personnel hiring office down on Dover Street, a tired-acting old white clerk